Create a custom colour palette in Vectorworks

One of the questions we are asked most often is how to create a studio drawing style in Vectorworks?

Whether you are an artist or musician, jeweller or blacksmith, your design style will develop over time as you gain experience and knowledge. It’s no different as a garden designer or landscape architect. At college or university you will be exposed to lots different drawing styles - both 2D and 3D - but if you are still looking for inspiration then typing “garden masterplan” into a search engine will return lots of examples.

Whether you prefer weighted line drawings, simple colours or decorative textures, one way to start creating your own studio style is with a custom colour palette. Using a defined colour palette from the outset will help keep your drawing style coherent and cohesive!

To help with this we’ve put together an easy four-step guide to creating custom colour palettes in Vectorworks.

Vectorworks provides colour palettes from a range of well known colour specialists including BEHR, Benjamin Moore, Pantone and RAL. I like the monochromatic colour gradients offered by BEHR, but you can also create your own. There are lots of websites to help you with this (I like this one, increase the number of colours using the plus icon on the right of the gradient and move your mouse cursor around the screen change the colour - don’t forget to screenshot the gradients you like!).

I tend to start with four complementary monochromatic colour gradients - a green, blue, brown and neutral - which I use alongside the Vectorworks warm greys (Vectorworks also has neutral and cool greys). I then use these colours to create hatches and assign fills to my classes. As each colour comes from a defined colour palette, your drawings will have a much more cohesive feel than if you select from multiple palettes.

If you are using textured image fills, you can also use your custom colour palette as a guide to ensure the images you select tie in with your style.

In the meantime, whether you’re new to Vectorworks or a long-time user, creating colour palettes can help define your style and save time when you make those ad-hoc colour selections we inevitably all need to do at one point or another.